Number of families in Ireland doubles in 20yrs

Ireland’s Central Statistics Office (CSO) released their Annual Yearbook last week, revealing the average house prices, salaries, car sales and births in the country.

Citizens can visit their website (www.cso.ie) to see how many other people are born on their birthday, as well as looking at an overview of the average family in Ireland.

The 1st of October is the most popular birthday, on average there were 191 babies born on that date, while the last 2 weeks in September make up the rest of the Top 10 most popular birthdays.

The least popular birth-date is February 29th, there were on average 45 babies born on that date followed by December 29th, 28th, 27th, March 17th, January 1st and December 23rd. It is the seventeenth edition of the Yearbook, and this year’s edition includes information on Census 2016. There were 22,626 marriages in 2016 including 1,056 same-sex marriages. This is 510 more than 2015, when 22,116 marriages were registered.

The average age of brides and grooms continues to rise, in 2016, the average age of the groom and bride in opposite sex marriages was 35.7 years and 33.8 years respectively, the highest recorded to date.

James and Emily were the most popular babies’ names in 2016. It is 22 years (1994) since James was the most popular boys name. Emily, on the other hand is the top girls name for the sixth successive year.

The top five boys’ names, James, Jack, Daniel, Conor and Sean have been in the top five since 2007 with minor changes to their order. For boys, the names Muhammad, Louis, Lucas, Josh, Jason and Ollie have had the most growth in popularity.

Muhammad jumped 36 places in the rankings since 2015, up from 119 to 83 in 2016 to make it the only new entrant into the top 100 names for boys. Willow and Matilda, have shown the most growth in popularity in girls’ names between 2015 and 2016 and these together with Harper, Heidi and Zoey, Aria were the only new entrants into the top 100 names for girls in 2016. Willow was ranked 72nd in 2016 up 49 places from 121 in 2015.

Matilda also improved position, up 49 places in the ranking from 146 in 2015 to 97 in 2016. There were 1,218,370 families in the State on Census Night, a rise of 51 per cent since 1996 and the average number of children per family was 1.38 in 2016 while in 1996 the average number of children per family was 1.82.

The number of persons’ in employment increased to 2,014,900 in 2016, as the overall unemployment rate decreased from 13.9 per cent in 2010 to 8.6 per cent in 2016. The number of persons unemployed in 2010 was 305,100 compared with 187,800 in 2016.